on a large scale. Neither could have seen any meaning in my own fancy for having things on a smaller and smaller scale." " T he Napoleon ofNotting Hill," after establishing its beautiful conceit, fritters away some of its energy in frantic plot-turning. Four years later, in "The Man Who Was Thursday," his other principle, the necessity of the imag- ination, got fully dramatized. The novel tells the story, in a mood deliberately feverish and overlit-snowstorms over St. Paul's and prismatic sunsets in the suburbs-of a young poet, Syme, who becomes a police- man in order to pursue an in- ternational circle of anarchists who have embarked on a nihil- istic war against civilization. The anar- chists' leaders, following Poès principle of the purloined letter-that no one no- tices the obvious-meet openly on a bal- cony overlooking Leicester Square. Each has taken as a code name a day of the week. Syme, after infiltrating the group, becomes Thursday; its chiefis the dread- ful Sunday. Syme discovers that the group is plotting a bombing in Paris, and sets off to stop it. As he races through England and across the Channel, he dis- covers that the entire circle of anarchists is really made up of undercover police- men, including the sinister-seraphic Sunday, who is, somewhat mystically, both the ultimate anarchist and the leading cop-the two faces of the deity, as Chesterton seems to have imagined him then. At times wonderfully funny, at times frightening, the book is filled with what we would now call existential panic, ren- dered not in an intuitive, dreamlike way, as in Carroll's "Jabberwocky" or "The Hunting of the Snark," but made to dis- turb through the invocation of a world almost but not quite like our own. It is a Surrealist atmosphere, in the sense that the awful and the extraordinary don't in- trude on the normal but rise from the normal-are the normal in another di- mension. (Here Kafka and Borges are implicit; Chesterton must have influenced both.) In "The Man Who Was Thurs- day," he recaptures a childhood sense of what it feels like to be frightened by a nothing that is still a something, and by the sense that ordinary things hold inti- mations of another world, that the crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead so easily that the dead are al- ready in the living room, pouring out of the broken porcelain. The book is also stippled with small epigrammatic mo- ments, as when Syme comes upon an anarchist poet, Gregory, standing by a street lamp ("whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree that bent out over the fence behind him") on a silent, starlit street: "I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might 1 have a mo- ment's conversation?" "Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder. Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself-there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold." "All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. 1 wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree." The really startling thing in the book is Chesterton's imagining of the anar- chists as philosopher-demons. It's easy to forget just how scary anarchists could seem at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the previous quarter century, they had killed a French President, an American President, and the Russian Tsar, and had bombed the Royal Green- wich Observatory, near London. (The same score now-Sarkozy, Bush, Putin, and the London Eye-and we'd all be under martial law.) 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